If I amend a marriage event in Rootsmagic, for example correcting a typo in the marriage place, only one of the two parties to the marriage shows as changed in Treeshare, and when I use Treeshare to update that marriage in Ancestry only the marriage event for that person is updated in Ancestry, leaving the two records for the one marriage between the two people inconsistent. This is unacceptable, especially since a subsequent amendment to one of the records in Ancestry’s front end does not seem to update the other after the two have become different; you have to delete the marriage and re-create it.
Certainly, the basic fault is with Ancestry; it should either have a single record for each marriage or ensure through a database procedure or otherwise that a change to one record triggers an automatic update to the other so that it is impossible for the two to be inconsistent.
Even so, RM should not do things in such a way as to cause problems in Ancestry for people using its software. Given the poor way that Ancestry works, RM should mark both parties to a marriage as changed if a marriage between the two of them is amended,
I have long since stopped creating new people in RM, because I know that marriages involving them will be corrupted in Ancestry, but I mistakenly thought that I could use RM’s tools to identify and fix discrepancies in place names and then replicate them back to Ancestry; it seems that i can’t do this either, at least not when marriages are involved.
The safest thing with updating ‘shared’ events, including Marriage and Residence, may be always to treat them as ‘create new’ and ‘delete old’. when picked up for Treeshare. I’ve found that Treeshare does not always detect minor changes to Place Details or Descriptions as changes prompting an update, and this may also be part of the problem
Thanks for the advice. I had already noticed that amendments that only involve spaces do not get picked up as differences. eg if I correct ‘Hackney ,London, England’ to ‘Hackney, London, England’ in RM, then the person comes up as changed, but the two facts appear identical, so I cannot reflect the change in Ancestry; I have to open the person in Ancestry to make the correction.
I now find that I have to remember to do the same thing for marriage changes.
When you make a change to the marriage in RM, It creates two changes needed in Treeshare, one for each person. If you delete the marriage event and then add it as a new one it does fix both, but when you look at the other person, they have two marriage events. The new one and the old one which then needs to be deleted.
TreeShare originally reported changes between Ancestry and RM when a RM place was edited but that created a problem for users because Ancestry lacks the ‘master’ Place structure that RM has. Thus one edit of a Place in RM which affects all uses of that Place in RM results in differences with all the Ancestry events that originally matched the RM events. So the developers suppressed reporting those differences.
None of the changes I have made have marked both the parties as altered in Treshare. I have just cleared all the changed people from Treeshare, altered one marriage and gone back in Treeshare. I see one person marked as changed there not two.
I should perhaps clarify how I have been making changes as this might be pertinent. I have been using the Places tab to find typos in my places. From there I have been going into the events linked to those places and chosing to edit. This brings up an edit person screen. (Even for marriages, it only shows a single event and brings up one edit person screen.) I edit the place name there.
As I test, the next time I found a marriage place I wanted to change, I exited the Places tab, found the same person in the People tab, opened the edit person screen and edited the place of the marriage. As you stated, this caused both the parties to the marriage to appear as changed in Treeshare.
So it seems that the problem only applies when editing marriage events by entering through the Places tab.
I am aware of that, and have commented on it in another thread in this forum. It is extremely inconvenient for people like me who use Ancestry as their master database; there is no point tidying things up in RM if they remain untidy in Ancestry. When I find a typo in a place name, I have therefore been going into each of the events associated with that place and correcting them individually in order to force an update in Treeshare. Even so, although corrections to typos like ‘London ,England’ cannot be copied through to Ancestry, although the people whose events have been corrected do appear on the changed list.
Your correct. Places does not change the sync time stamp for individuals. You have to edit a person to update the sync time stamp.
Now with that being said, I merge places all the time, therefore none of those places are being synced with Ancestry because I never made the change in each person.
Unfortunately, I end up sequentially going thru all of the Treeshare records about once a year to update the places and other items not identified in the Treeshare “changed” data list. Most changes are caused by correcting, spitting, and merging place data list entries. It can be a lengthy task for a large database that can take many hours.
Yes, it takes a long time to update the place data on Ancestry. It would seem to me that RM could offer a feature in the Ancestry TreeShare view to “Show Only Place Differences” for facts that have differences. That would surely reduce the time it takes to walk thru your entire file to update place data. This feature may require a sequential pass through the place entries to identify the differences but it would save users a lot of time.